Something not about blowing up people or elections.

Other people can talk about those.

A friend mentioned at lunchtime today something he'd heard on woman's hour on BBC Radio 4. A (female) journalist had made the observation that bookshops were full of self-help books for women, yet there wasn't a single book on how to help others.

From my own life & character, I know that often I feel better serving others than serving myself. I need to be able to work & help in order to hold off feeling down or without value, even though doing that can feel nearly impossible at times. Could there be a clue from the dead-sea principle?

We wandered around various ideas related to this, including the puzzlement that men don't get anorexia but many more men commit suicide than women, about how we didn't suffer body dismorphia when we were young and saw all those adverts for bullworkers in magazine an comics that told us we'd get sand kicked in our faces if we weren't built like Charles Atlas. Also included was the question as to whether the focus on self-fulfillment isn't just because of widespread illiteracy about faith, but also if a humanist focus that made us our own god had robbed us of the ability to serve something greater and become less fractured through doing so.

And now off to washing lab floors. :-)